This week was rich with valuable lessons, basically all of them positive, even if a few of them were rather painful to experience.

Since my last journal, I became fraught with a terrible worry that one day I would look up to find that everyone I care about has gone, moved on, and left me behind. A fire was lit under my tail like never before. I expressed my regrets about feeling as though I'm falling out of favor to one of my absolute dearest loved ones, and she had basically the same message as always:

Paraphrasing, "You're being silly, Cy. Nobody secretly hates you. Everyone loves when you're around. They like you, and they want to see you and hear from you and talk to you."

She had been struggling to reassure me of these things for over ten entire years. Hammering this message upon me like a blacksmith ... except the iron was cold and very resistant to receiving the direction to change its shape.

That's where this time was different.
Ever since beginning my current medication in mid-june, I have experienced ... lots of beneficial effects, actually--but the most relevant one to this development is what feels like increased flexibility and plasticity of mindset. So... metaphorically speaking, it is as if my iron was finally heated in a forge.

And thus, the blacksmith's blows have actually been able to SHAPE the iron.
Her reassurances, for the first time actually got through to me,
and the persistent delusion that had haunted me for years...
...simply vanished as if smoke in a gentle breeze.

Just like that, the anxiety that used to keep me from reaching out to those I love vanished.
From that very moment, I no longer felt hesitation, or as though I had to climb over a barrier, to just say hello.
The fatigue I used to feel when confronting the possibility of engaging socially was nowhere to be felt.
I ... was free.
I am free.

I went through my contact list realizing how terribly, agonizingly long it had been since last I had spoken to so many people I held dear. Once again, having unloaded and unpacked extraneous baggage that I had been carrying for so long that I'd forgotten it had taken up space or weighed me down at all, I suddenly had room to think, room to recognized the holes in me--each shaped like a long lost loved one or a crucial element of my moral compass--that had been previously blocked by pointless, irrelevant, maladaptive emotional scarring. One by one, I am picking up these pieces. One by one, I am reaching out to these people I've so dearly missed but had been unable to bring myself to talk to, one by one, finally ACTUALLY telling them how very much they REALLY mean to me, and how I TRULY feel about each of them, I was at long last able to relate to these precious individuals I've shamefully neglected for years what I appreciate, respect, and admire about them, and what I see OTHERS loving about them as well, telling them that I did not ever forget about them--which is true!--and that I have missed them most heartwrenchingly.

...and one by one, they welcomed me with open arms.

....

I cried.
Each day.
I wept in joyous catharsis--again able to FEEL things to which I had forgotten I'd grown numb over these cold, harrowing years.

I felt as though I had lived my whole life in a box buried under the dirt, and that for the first time, I was now tasting fresh air, and seeing the sky...

I felt
so
alive...!

And I still do.

I do not remember a time where I have felt more like ... myself. More whole than this.

In the course of reconnecting, I gained something I had resigned myself to never receive:
Closure about those particular people I would never see again.
The one I thought I loved, who turned out to be a shell, in particular.

I even reattained the ability to, without hesitation, tell those to whom I am romantically imprinted, that I love them. I love them unreservedly, wholeheartedly, unconditionally, that they owe me nothing and i am entitled to nothing but that I desire more than anything else to be by their side in any capacity, to support them, to nurture them, to encourage them. And, somehow, I am accepted as I am.

A few days later, I once again experienced a resurgence of the anxiety that once used to drive me into hiding by making me feel--erroneously--that I was unwanted, ignored, annoying, infuriating, distracting, about to be discarded or abandoned or banished, any number of terrible conclusions of psychological self-harm. But this time, I REFUSED to crawl into a hole and disappear. I REFUSED to return to that horrid old habit that stole me from all the people who mattered most to me. I stood my ground, despite feeling this avalanche of hardship trying to bury me alive, despite feeling like I had been only making my situation worse, despite feeling like I was driving those loved ones away with my toxic delusions. But I made it through. I made it through without ruining the bridges I had just rebuilt. I made it through without retreating.

Most importantly of all, I made it through with critical reconnaissance: I saw the face of my tormentor from within. I stared it in the eye. I named it.

The clarity my mind now possessed was now able, as never before, to perceive the causal connections:
Once--in June--was happenstance.
Twice--in August--was coincidence.
This third time, in September, exposed THE PATTERN:

It's so stupid. It's so simple. It's so insidiously disguised as innocuous.
This attack of emotional hallucinations is hormonal in nature.
It is triggered through metabolic interactions.
It happens EVERY TIME I INDULGE IN SUGAR.

I Shit You Not. If I consume, say, more than 3 or 4 12oz soda cans' worth of sucrose/fructose in a day, LIKE CLOCKWORK, NO MORE THAN 12 HOURS LATER, I will feel my mood precipitously CRASH. And for the next 24 hours after that, I will be helpless to waves of hostile emotional hallucinations that continue to batter me even though I know they are baseless and false.

I have been feeling better without it.
Everything, actually, has felt better, the longer I avoid sugar intake.
No acid reflux. No fatigue. No joint pain. No muscle soreness. A generally improved mood and disposition. Even more mental clarity than what my medication would have given me alone. Together, it is no wonder why I have made such a grand corrective redirection.

I hope that I shall never have to worry about running away from the people I love ever again.
I know what I must do.
And I shall do it.